Last Thursday, two United States cabinet departments – the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Justice – issued separate but thematically related announcements (see here and here) regarding new initiatives to combat corruption, money laundering, and related malfeasance:

• Treasury announced the finalization of a new Customer Due Diligence (CDD) rule (discussed previously on this blog), which would require that financial institutions collect and verify the personal information of the beneficial owners of accounts held at those institutions. Treasury also announced a proposal for new regulations that would require certain foreign-owned entities (single-member limited liability companies (LLC)) to obtain a tax ID number and report comply with the associated reporting requirements—a move that would close a loophole that currently allows these entities to shield the foreign owners of non-U.S. assets.
• Treasury also announced that it plans to send draft legislation to Congress (the text of which does not yet seem to be publicly available) that would require companies to know and report accurate beneficial ownership information at the time of a company’s creation, and to file this information with the Treasury Department.
• Justice also submitted proposed legislation to Congress that would give the Department new investigative powers (including the use of administrative subpoenas, rather than slower and less flexible grand jury subpoenas, for money laundering investigations, enhanced authority to access foreign bank and business records, and the ability to restrain property based on a request from a foreign country for 90 rather than 30 days). The draft legislation would also creating a mechanism to use and protect classified information in civil asset recovery cases, and would expand the scope of the money laundering offense to include, as a sufficient predicate offense, any violation of foreign law that would be a violation of U.S. law if committed in the United States.

I have not yet had time to review the final CCD rule or the proposed LLC rule, and as I noted above, I don’t think the full text of the legislative proposals is yet available. So I’m not yet in a position to comment on the substance, but at least on the surface, all this seems encouraging. It’s possible to take the cynical view that most of this doesn’t mean very much or represent genuine progress. And I’ll admit part of me is inclined to embrace the cynical view. But on the whole, I do think that last week’s announcements are genuinely encouraging, and signal the possibility of building greater political momentum for real progress.

First, though, the reasons for cynicism: Continue reading →